EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The uptake of the ecosystem services concept in planning discourses of European and American cities

Rieke Hansen, Niki Frantzeskaki, Timon McPhearson, Emily Rall, Nadja Kabisch, Anna Kaczorowska, Jaan-Henrik Kain, Martina Artmann and Stephan Pauleit

Ecosystem Services, 2015, vol. 12, issue C, 228-246

Abstract: Ecosystem services (ES) are gaining increasing attention as a promising concept to more actively consider and plan for the varied benefits of the urban environment. Yet, to have an impact on decision-making, the concept must spread from academia to practice. To understand how ES have been taken up in planning discourses we conducted a cross-case comparison of planning documents in Berlin, New York, Salzburg, Seattle and Stockholm. We found: (1) explicit references to the ES concept were primarily in documents from Stockholm and New York, two cities in countries that entered into ES discourses early. (2) Implicit references and thus potential linkages between the ES concept and planning discourses were found frequently among all cities, especially in Seattle. (3) The thematic scope, represented by 21 different ES, is comparably broad among the cases, while cultural services and habitat provision are most frequently emphasized. (4) High-level policies were shown to promote the adoption of the ES concept in planning. We find that the ES concept holds potential to strengthen a holistic consideration of urban nature and its benefits in planning. We also revealed potential for further development of ES approaches with regard to mitigation of environmental impacts and improving urban resilience.

Keywords: Ecosystem services; Urban planning; Discourses; Human–nature relations; Resilience; Policy-making (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (59)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212041614001521
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecoser:v:12:y:2015:i:c:p:228-246

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecoser.2014.11.013

Access Statistics for this article

Ecosystem Services is currently edited by Leon C Braat

More articles in Ecosystem Services from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu (repec@elsevier.com).

 
Page updated 2024-12-28
Handle: RePEc:eee:ecoser:v:12:y:2015:i:c:p:228-246